Real Lace (32 page)

Even Vittorio De Sica, who had not expected to be, was impressed. “I had thought of it as a purely social group of nobles in
uniforms, with ceremonies and lots of pomp,” he said at the time. But, after observing the noble gentlemen at work with lepers, earthquake victims, and mentally retarded children, he changed his mind. “They are doing real works of charity,” he said, “Christian charity.”

In the United States, meanwhile, the First Irish Families are often criticized for limiting their philanthropy to the Catholic Church, Church-connected projects, and the Democratic Party. It is true that, when it comes to charity, Catholics have tended to favor Catholic charities, just as Jews have lent their main support to Jewish philanthropies with a “Let's take care of our own first” philosophy. And, just as the Zionist cause was not a “fashionable” one among upper-class American Jews, the Irish cause at the time of the “trouble” was not popular among the F.I.F.'s, who did little to support it. President Eamon de Valera's comment that such money as had come from the United States to support the Irish Revolution came from housemaids and laborers was not entirely an exaggeration. Grandpa R. J. Cuddihy was one of the few wealthy New Yorkers who gave money to the Irish cause, but when his mother found out about it, she was furious.

There are certain Catholic charities that are more fashionable than others. In New York, in addition to the Foundling Hospital, families like the Murrays, McDonnells, and Cuddihys have helped make the Catholic Big Sisters more or less the Catholic answer to the Junior League. The Big Sisters counsel and place in foster homes young girls in trouble with their families or referred to them by Family Court. Then there is the Guild of the Infant Saviour, founded in 1901 to “give sanctuary to the destitute young girl, friendless, alone, and facing motherhood.” At one point, the Guild had among its fourteen directors Mr. Robert J. Cuddihy; his daughter-in-law, Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy; her sister, Mrs. J. Ennis McQuail; and Mrs. Cuddihy's daughter's aunt-in-law, Mrs. Walter E. Travers, the former Genevieve Butler. Another “
social” Catholic charity that is equally inbred is St. Vincent's Hospital. For a 1959 benefit fashion show on behalf of the Cardinal Spellman Wing of St. Vincent's Hospital in Westchester, the seven models—all size ten—were Mary Jane Cuddihy MacGuire; her daughter, Judith Ann; her sister, Anne Marie Cuddihy; their mother, Mrs. H. Lester Cuddihy; and three cousins, Mrs. Basil Harris, Mrs. Thomas Sheridan, and Mrs. Murray Roche. Just as chic—and just as full of the same people as its leading benefactors—is the Catholic Center for the Blind. All these organizations, the F.I.F.'s are quick to point out, may be Catholic-sponsored, but they serve all creeds.

Just as there are fashionable charities, there are also fashionable churches. One might suppose that the “Power House,” St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, would be one of these, but it is not. St. Patrick's is regarded as “lace curtain,” and for tourists. Most of the First Families worship at St. Thomas More, St. Ignatius Loyola, or at St. Jean Baptiste, “the Thomas Fortune Ryan church.” “The reason for this is mostly geographic, not snobbish,” says one of the Murrays. “They're located more convenient to where we live”—on the Upper East Side, on or off Park Avenue. Still, as a result of their addresses (and because they are smaller, more elegant and restrained in their decor), these three have become known as New York's “snob churches” among other Catholics. One, indeed, has been humorously christened “Our Lady of the Cadillac.”

Though the Democratic Party might not, strictly speaking, be considered a charity, there are ways in which it can be treated as one. If, say, one wishes to contribute $10,000 to the Democratic Party, which is not tax-deductible, he can make a gift of $100,000 to the Church, which is. The Church then, quietly and without fanfare, can transfer $10,000 to the party, keeping the $90,000 for itself.

Non-Catholics often assume, of course, that the Church itself is
immensely rich, and therefore hugely powerful. It is indeed rich, but in many archdioceses, including the largest ones, it is land-rich and cash-poor. In New York, for example, the nonparochial real estate owned directly by the Archbishopric is worth about $105 million, with the high school properties alone worth about $51.9 million. It is true that the Chancery's cash accounts receivable and securities holdings amount to an additional $97.4 million, but these “liquid assets” are actually somewhat less liquid than they appear to be. Of the $97.4 million, $76.4 million is in the form of cash mortgage loans made over the years to individual parishes, and because only a small fraction of this sum would be collectible in any one year, to call the whole $76.4 million a liquid asset is, to say the least, optimistic.

The total parish and nonparish assets of the New York Archdiocese have been estimated at $750 million, a goodly sum indeed, and a full list of the Chancery's real-estate holdings would be a lengthy one. And yet, with a single exception, these holdings are institutional properties used entirely for religious, educational, and charitable purposes. The exception is the Sperry & Hutchinson Building at 330 Madison Avenue, which the Archdiocese bought in 1967 and now wishes it had not. It has not been a successful venture. Harry Helmsley of the Helmsley-Spear realestate firm in Manhattan has been quoted as saying, “There is no way for the Church to come out in good shape” on the S-H sale and lease-back. And another real-estate man has said, “John Reynolds [the Archdiocesan real-estate broker] better see to it that the Cardinal gets lots of Green Stamps.”

Perhaps the charge that disturbs the Irish the most is that, in not supporting the arts, sciences, and non-Catholic education to the extent that Jews do, they are “nonintellectual.” The picture is often drawn of the Jew going out to concerts, operas, theater, and ballet, acquiring paintings and giving them away to museums, and buying books, while the Irish Catholic sits home watching
football games on television, drinking beer. A Catholic sociologist, Father Andrew M. Greeley, has even lent support to this. The Irish, he insists, are not really “dumb Micks,” but while Jewish intellectuals have boldly asserted themselves and imposed their vision upon the rest of America, the Irish have sat back passively, immobilized by their sense of inferiority. Irish intellectuals capable of publishing often don't, he says, because they fear making themselves vulnerable to criticism.

Their fear, he says, comes about from the repressive way in which the children of the Irish are often reared. Too many Irish, Father Greeley feels, fear that to be “different” risks loss of the “respectability” that took them such hard work, over so many generations, to achieve. As a result, he says, the vast majority of brilliant young American Irishmen are doomed to “lead lives of noisy desperation, availing themselves of all the mechanisms of self-destruction that the Irish have traditionally made available for themselves—drink, obesity, temper tantrums, unending quarrels.” Their preoccupation with being accepted by the “nice” people accounts for the fact, he implies, that there are no Irish Einsteins.

Well, people like the Murrays would take rather strong exception to Father Greeley's generalizations. Grandpa Murray and Uncle “Atomic Tom” Murray may not have been intellectuals exactly, but they were certainly smart. Nor did they drink much. They were a handsome lot, and kept their figures, and they did not encourage quarrels—though there was a bit of that. The Murrays also have a published author in the family, John F. (“Jake”) Murray, Jr., whose novel
The Devil Walks on Water
(Little, Brown), about a rich Irish Catholic family in Southampton, caused a bit of a stir in the family when it was published in 1969. In Jake Murray's book, a number of the family recognized themselves, while others preferred not to, and quite a few Murrays found the title blasphemous.

Then, consider Patent Number 3,038,030, recently awarded to the Jesuit priest in the family, Father D. Bradley Murray, who teaches mathematics at the Georgetown Preparatory School in Garrett Park, Maryland. He is one of Grandpa Murray's grandsons, and his patent is for an electronic translator designed to convert the dots and dashes of Morse code into the binary code, the common language of modern computers. His invention's primary usefulness will be in naval and military communications. Once a radio message is translated into the binary code, it is a quick step from there to the teletypewriter. This is the first Murray patent in the third generation, but clearly young Father Murray is following in the footsteps of his grandfather and his father, Atomic Tom. Clearly, the family feels, there is good cause to speak in the same breath of Einsteins, Oppenheimers, Salks, Freuds,
and
Murrays.

Part Four

WHAT DID HAPPEN

Chapter 23

PROBLEMS IN THE BACK OFFICE

From the end of World War II on, the stock market was going pretty much straight up. It was easy for bankers and stockbrokers to believe that it would glide steadily upward forever. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to invest, and at firms like McDonnell & Company there seemed to be no serious problems. The McDonnells continued to live lavishly, with their fourteen children, in their vast apartment at 910 Fifth Avenue, and at “East Wickapogue Cottage” in Southampton. In those days, brokerage firms were making money almost in spite of themselves, and, when James Francis McDonnell died in 1958 at the age of seventy-nine, control of his firm was taken over by his second oldest son, Murray McDonnell, and the company's future seemed secure.

Murray McDonnell is a slightly built, amiable, easy-to-please fellow, who looks rather like a college English professor as cast by Hollywood. He loves horses, and has also inherited his father's
taste for splendid living. He and his wife, the daughter of New York banker Horace Flanigan, and their nine children were widely written about in the society columns, where he was frequently mentioned as the “second father” of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy's children, often entertaining the Kennedys at his horse farm in New Jersey, and inviting Mrs. Kennedy to his castle in Ireland. True, Murray seemed to spend more time with his horses and his social life than with his business, but that was all right. After all, wasn't that what a rich man was supposed to do? Murray had been placed in charge of the firm's day-to-day operations as early as 1945, when he was only twenty-three. But his real preference was selling, and he maintained a number of large accounts, including several for the Church, which yielded between one and two million dollars in annual commissions. After his father's death, Murray McDonnell announced grandiose plans for McDonnell & Company. It would become, he said, “another Merrill Lynch,” a Cadillac among stockbrokerage houses. He opened more new offices and, as usual, had them lavishly furnished and decorated. Even the chairs for the secretaries cost three hundred dollars apiece.

There were a few problems, but they seemed minor. The third brother, Charles—nicknamed “Bish” because he had been named after the Bishop of Brooklyn—resigned from McDonnell & Company as a result of a disagreement over Murray McDonnell's business methods, and joined another Wall Street firm. One of the two men's sisters has described the differences in Murray's and Bish's personalities by saying, “Bish would take two strokes away from a golfer's handicap. Murray would add two.” But one of the firm's greatest assets—in terms of both prestige and credit—was the presence in the family of Henry Ford. It was an intangible asset, to be sure, but it had become a general assumption on Wall Street that if ever Murray McDonnell needed money he could always tap the almost limitless resources of his brother-in-law. In fact, there is
evidence that Ford did lend McDonnell & Company something in the neighborhood of a million dollars at one point to help the firm consummate some deal. If this is true, it is unlikely that this loan has been repaid.

The importance of the Ford name and “connection” with the family was brought home dramatically to one of the McDonnell cousins, young John Murray Cuddihy, when he and another cousin were junketing around Europe one summer. “We were just college kids,” he recalls, “and traveling on a very limited budget, but the minute the word got out that one of my cousins was Mrs. Henry Ford, we got treated like royalty. Naturally, we made the most of this, wherever we went.”

Henry Ford II is a burly, roly-poly, extremely sociable man who loves to give and go to parties. He tossed an extravagant coming-out party in 1959 for his oldest daughter, Charlotte. The party, which featured a Middle Ages decor, was held at the Detroit Country Club and was billed as “The Party of the Century.” There were twelve hundred guests ranging from the Gary Coopers to Lord Charles Spencer-Churchill, and the whole thing cost $250,000, a record for a debutante affair. Two years later, Henry Ford threw another “Party of the Century” for his second daughter, Anne, which cost just as much. The fact that Ford would give such publicity-ridden parties was an indication that he did not have the aristocratic social inhibitions that would prevent, say, a Thomas J. Watson or a Rockefeller from indulging in such gaudiness. Anne McDonnell Ford, meanwhile, was a coolly blonde thinlipped beauty who had some of the iciness and reserve of her father, whom the family called “Little Caesar.” She saw to it that her daughters went to strict Catholic schools, and were raised as “perfect convent girls.” She taught them to do the proper things and to go to the proper places. At their mother's urging, the girls went to Paris to study, Gstaad to ski. The girls traveled to Europe often, frequently with their father, while their mother stayed
behind quietly in the Ford mansion in Grosse Pointe on the shore of Lake St. Clair. Henry Ford bought a yacht and took Mediterranean cruises regularly, entertaining friends on board and throwing parties whenever the boat came into port—again, often while his wife stayed home. When Anne Ford went to Europe, she was usually alone.